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The Grudge From Hell

"Yo' boys has got to die." So said Devil Anse Hatfield to the McCoys' matriarch before executing her sons in a barrage of gunfire.

By

Barton Swaim

June 6, 2013 2:48 p.m. ET

Young Anderson Hatfield once frightened a bear into a tree by screaming like a madman and kicking it on the backside. He kept the animal there while someone fetched ammunition for his rifle. When he returned home, having killed his first bear, his mother pronounced the boy—or so one legend has it—"afeared of no kind of varmint nor of the devil hisself!" Anderson, still in his teens, became "Devil Anse."

After the Civil War, during which he fought as a guerrilla for the Confederacy, Devil Anse would marry...